Just wondering if anyone had any advise on converting the Starblazers Cartoon into a CAH game...the most important aspect and prob the most difficult aspect would the aforementioned deadline.

For those who may not be familar with Starblazers...earth had been attacked by an alien army and the population had to retreat underground to protect themselves from deadly radiation, radiation that would destroy all life on earth within a year..an alien princess contacts earth and offers them an antedote for the radiation and the Starblazer set off to get it

SO thus begins a race against the clock..the starblazers had a year to journey to a distant planet retrieve the antedote and get back to earth in time to prevent the end of life on the planet.

of course in the meantime they have to fight the enemy army and go through a lot of other adventures.

Each episode ended with a countdown...only 255 days left to save the earth...only 254 days left to save the earth...etc etc

I am not very familiar with Starblazers (Space Battleship Yamato), but I read bits and pieces about it, and I really enjoy the other works of Leiji Matsumoto that I've seen. Just two days ago I told someone on our mailing list how great I think Captain Harlock is.

I don't think you'll have any major difficulties in converting characters and spaceships from the series to CAH. As for the deadline thing... that's a nice touch, but it would only come into play if you played it as an on-going campaign, and you knew that you also had the same players come back for the next episode.

I'm not sure if you can say you'll have 254 play sessions at the beginning of a series. That's quite a lot. Most of us are lucky if we play once a week.I'd suggest making it an even shorter timespan, and give the players plenty of reasons to hang in there until the next episode. Make it a month to save the Earth, then 25 days, 20 days, ...

Since you control the clock, you can make the deadline as close or distant as you like. But I must agree that a whole year is a bit much, especially if you decide that every adventure only takes a day. If every adventure took a week, maybe you could get away with the year...maybe.

The important thing is to be consistent about how much time is left. If you lose track, the players will no doubt notice and give you grief about it. So have the time left written down somewhere and update it after every session.